Friday

Aug 15, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 15, 2008 at 3:00 PM

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the latest in a series of special articles The Oak Ridger is publishing leading up to Monday's 3 p.m. dedication of the reconstructed and renovated Oak Ridge High School. Open to the public, the ceremony will be held in the school's new auditorium.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the latest in a series of special articles The Oak Ridger is publishing leading up to Monday's 3 p.m. dedication of the reconstructed and renovated Oak Ridge High School. Open to the public, the ceremony will be held in the school's new auditorium.

As then-High School Principal Ken Green, School Superintendent Tom Bailey and others in the community sought ways to elevate a new Oak Ridge High School "from good to great," a nonprofit education foundation formed earlier to provide support to public schools became the vehicle to reach that goal.

The Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation made an $8 million difference in the renovated school opening Monday. Those private funds raised in the community also provided the leverage needed, and the match required, for an additional $9 million in bonds.

The two funds combined made the difference between a standard high school and an outstanding one befitting the students, teachers, and community that hold education in high regard. The key to such a daunting fund-raising task in a city the size of Oak Ridge was finding the right people to lead the campaign.

In the summer of 2004, Pete Craven, a driving force behind the school campaign and a member of the Education Foundation board, visited Herman and Pat Postma, hoping to convince them to chair the campaign. Craven, a former classmate of Pat's, knew education was paramount during Pat's childhood here. Her father, Tom Dunigan, had been a teacher, vice principal and principal during that time -- serving as the high school's principal from 1954 to 1971.

"I grew up in Oak Ridge and came in 1943 when I was a tot," Pat Postma recalled. "Dad was principal of the high school, and education was a primary focus in our family.

"Herman came here as a graduate student working in the summers, and then as a permanent employee in 1959," she said. "From the time he became a resident of Oak Ridge, he worked very hard on making things work for the city -- both in his professional capacity and his personal capacity.

"It was in his nature to want to make everything he did as good as it possibly could be, and I think we both saw this school project as something extremely important," Pat said. "I refer to it as a once in 50 year event."

Herman Postma, the retired director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Pat Postma, retired assistant dean in the University of Tennessee College of Business, with responsibility for all degree and non-degree executive education programs, said "yes." Before the campaign's public kick-off ceremony, however, Herman Postma died unexpectedly while vacationing with his wife.

"I had to confront the question: Was this something I could and should and wanted to do by myself after Herman died?" Pat said.

"And I did."

Pat Postma's connection to the world of education, and her belief that this was an exceptional city, propelled her. "There was very clearly a huge pride in the city among people who lived here," she said. "It was academic ... but it was also football championships and having the best bands and other things. I felt that legacy of Oak Ridge: There was no other ambition but to be truly excellent. It was time for Oak Ridge to recapture that."

In the early fall of 2004, Pat and Herman sought advice from Kay Whitman, then-director of development for the UT College of Business and later UT associate vice chancellor, who played a leadership role during UT's $1 billion campaign.

Whitman continued to advise Pat Postma, helping to structure the case statement for the campaign and participating in workshops to help the Education Foundation board understand the scale of the campaign.

Even earlier, a group of community representatives began meeting regularly to explore what could be done to improve the aging Oak Ridge High School. They worked with Oak Ridge Deputy City Manager Steve Jenkins to prepare financial models for funding, but none of the financial models added up to what they knew it would require.

Jenkins and Alex Fischer, then with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and now vice president for commercialization at Battelle, alerted the group to the possibility of Qualified Zone Academy Bonds, federal bonds available through recently enacted state legislation. The bonds could provide up to $9 million, provided that the community matched it with $8 million.

"It would have never happened in the way it did without QZAB bonds," Fischer said. "You had the sales tax referendum, you had the availability of QZAB, you had enormous private sector fund raising, you had vision by all sorts of people, and you had need.

"All of that crescendoed into what it could be."

And that suddenly made it possible to contemplate doing an ambitious renovation of the new high school, according to Thom Mason, who chairs the Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation board. The sales tax referendum would raise $38 million, with QZAB and private funds bolstering that. The final cost of the high school is almost $61 million, including $51 million for construction and about $9.5 million for "soft costs" of engineering, architects, furniture, and contingency, according to Superintendent Bailey.

"I've never seen a community leverage this much money to build a high school," Bailey said. And Green, now assistant superintendent, added: "Communities have voted for some pretty massive bond referendums to get schools built, which is a common scenario, but not donations at that level."

To raise the local match, the group's attention turned to the Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed in 2000 with a charter describing its role as enhancing public education in Oak Ridge. Mason, now director of ORNL and then in charge of the lab's Spallation Neutron Source, was a member of the community group meeting regularly about the schools. He volunteered to serve on the Education Foundation's board as it was reconstituted and enlarged to take on the massive fund-raising drive and was tapped to serve as its board chair.

He cited a number of reasons for choosing to work with the foundation. "I live in Oak Ridge and have kids in the schools," Mason said. "I chose to live here because of the quality of life in general and the education system in particular, and that can't be taken for granted. You have to work at it.

"Although I wasn't asked by the lab to work with the foundation, UT-Battelle does encourage involvement in the community," Mason said. "It was a matter of doing something I cared about, and ORPSEF fit the bill."

The Postmas were then recruited to chair the fund drive, and Pat remained committed to the drive after Herman's untimely death.

"Pat represents more than anyone the thread that connects the original school to the current one," said Billy Stair, ORNL's director of Communications and External Relations. Postma had graduated from Oak Ridge High School in 1956, in the second class to start and graduate from the new, modern $3 million school, when her father was principal.

"She went to the school when it was new then, her children went to Oak Ridge High School -- and she helped lead the effort to rebuild it 50 years later," Stair pointed out.

Working with Whitman, Pat Postma learned it was important to have 50 percent of the goal in place before asking publicly for money. UT-Battelle, the managing contractor for the national lab, had already pledged $2 million and helped the Education Foundation raise another $3 million from other large government contractors in Oak Ridge and about $500,000 in other pledges. With $5.5 million pledged, the community campaign officially kicked off in February 2005, with the goal of raising another $3 million.

Then, Pat and the Education Foundation focused on families, individuals, and companies. "We did try very hard to approach families who had several children graduate from the high school -- who had three or four children who went to college and succeeded and had wonderful careers and were prosperous and happy," Postma said. "And there were a number of those."

They asked about a dozen families -- parents and children combined -- to contribute $5,000 a year for five years, she said, and those solicitations were very successful. "The multi-generation family connection was an important piece," Postma conceded.

By the end of 2005, most of the pledges were in hand. The Education Foundation received contributions and pledges from more than 1,000 donors, including five donors in the "visionary" category of $500,000 and above.

"My estimate of the time from when major contractors agreed on their commitments, through the sales tax referendum, and actually having the $8 million pledged in hand was 18 months, which is absolutely phenomenal," Postma said. "We had no reason to believe this could succeed in terms of a town the size of Oak Ridge and the comparative scale of this to anything we had done before.

"And, yet, this is a model.

"Oak Ridge has a lot of things we need to do to keep it alive and vital," Postma said. "I see no reason we can't do other 'undoable' things.

"We can ... if that's what we decide."

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